“You want to do what?” Cam asked me, wide-eyed, in the back of the bus. We were still about 20 minutes away from the main campus of the 780-acre State Police Academy in New Braintree.

  The academy had approximately 20 buildings with various purposes. There were training and instruction spaces, K-9 facilities, residential spaces, a chow hall, a medical building, a firing range, a mock residential area called “Circle Drive,” and a regional dispatch hub for the local area. Then there were the western woods, which comprised more than half of the acreage. Inside the woods were running paths, obstacle courses, and storage outbuildings.

  The academy was run like a paramilitary organization, and despite recent political efforts to make daily operations more transparent to the public, what went on there remained within its borders. This was doubly true for recruits. Except for the liberties allowed once every month or so, recruits did not have the freedom to come and go as they pleased.

  There were only three entrances that allowed traffic to enter and exit the fenced-in main campus. These gates were monitored around the clock. Everyone coming or going from the academy was logged at those gates. All of these things contributed to the fact that I had just proposed the singularly stupidest thing I had ever set my mind to.

  “I told you. I’m going to break out tonight.”

  Cam’s eyes pleaded with me to see the absurdity of what I was saying. “We’ll get expelled!”

  “I’m not asking you to go with me,” I quickly interjected.

  Cam’s face fell. That I would even suggest I go alone upset him. “Tell me why,” he finally said, appearing to have resigned himself to my course of action.

  “I’m going to go find Dan Driver.”

  “Who?” Cam asked, and then recognition dawned. “The guy from Diaz’s story? Why?”

  I swallowed hard. “I have leukemia, buddy,” I admitted. I’d been trying to find a time to tell him all day, but we rarely had unstructured time. As it was, we would get to base with barely enough time to eat, study, and undergo inspection. Lights out would be immediately after.

  Cam’s face whitened, making the freckles scattered across his nose and cheeks stand out even more. I could see him thinking back through my recent struggles in PT and EVOC. I waited, giving him time to wrap his head around it.

  Finally, he sighed. “I’m in. Diaz said that Driver’s a regular at O’Connor’s… that’s the Irish place in West Boylston, right?”

  I nodded, relieved. I honestly wasn’t sure if I would make it on my own, given my fatigue.

  “You sure you don’t want to wait until this weekend?” he asked.

  “I might get kicked out of the academy tomorrow. I can’t wait another day. I need to know if the story is true, and if it is…”

  Cam’s face was still twisted up with conflicting emotions, but we’d been friends our entire lives. He’d already known I wouldn’t be willing to wait. “So what’s the play?”

  “We sneak out after everyone goes to sleep and make our way over to West Boylston to find Dan Driver.”

  “At O’Connors?” he asked. I nodded. “It’s at least a half hour there and a half hour back, plus the time it takes to find him, not to mention the time it will take us to make our way out of the compound without getting caught. We can’t do this trip in anything less than 3 hours… and that’s assuming we have a ride.”

  “Leave that to me.” I had already set that particular cog in motion.

  “Okay, Darth…” Cam said with a concerned chuckle.

  The bus dropped us off in New Braintree at 2000 hours, and we ate and studied for the next hour. At 2100, we had inspections and a final formation for the day, mostly entailing the recruits forming up in the barracks, conducting roll call, receiving announcements, and participating in a final debrief of the day. There was no corrective PT, so we were left alone for lights out at 2200.

  When the lights finally clicked out, I felt something inside me click on, as if my future were changing in that moment. I lay still, listening and waiting impatiently for the other recruits to settle in for the night. For better or worse, I was committed, and I had involved my best friend in my crazy plan. Our futures were intertwined now.

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  If we were caught, we would indeed be expelled from the academy. Worse, being AWOL would likely result in further punishment, possibly jail time. It didn’t matter. Nothing seemed to hold the same weight as it had before I found out I was dying.

  I lay in my rack, listening to the quiet click of the clock just past the foot of my bed. My bunk was at the far end of the squad bay, next to the head, where the first step of my plan would come into play. My eyes flicked to the clock nearly every minute for the next hour. The “random” rounds made by the academy training staff happened nearly on the hour, as if the overnight officers set their watches to check on us. Once the midnight hour ticked by and the next round came through, I quietly bunched up my blankets and pillow and made my way into the head. Cam met me there only minutes later.

  The room was sterile and cold, tiled from floor to ceiling in dull beige squares that smelled of bleach and sweat. Stainless steel sinks lined one wall beneath warped mirrors, and in an adjacent room, the shower bays felt cavernous even in the dark. High, frosted windows near the ceiling let in a pale, gray light from a full moon that likely illuminated the academy grounds. Perfect.

  Making our way quickly to the window closest to the bathroom entryway, so as not to be seen from the squad bay if anyone woke up, we looked up at the window both Cam and I had been studying off and on for the last few hours. The windows in the head were mainly for ventilation and only tilted out a few inches, unlike traditional windows, which open fully.

  When I first began concocting my plan, I had to think hard about whether there were bars on the windows. But it turned out that it had never been an issue. Bars were unnecessary because there was no way a person could squeeze in and out of these windows…unless, of course, that person had smuggled in a screwdriver from the EVOC garage and stored it in the window before inspection.

  My main worry had been whether Cam would be able to climb up and out of the building, as I still pictured him as the slightly pudgy man I’d known my entire life. But watching him in action now, I realized the academy had trimmed him down. This last week, in fact, he’d run better times than I had in PT.

  It didn’t take us long to disconnect the bar that attached the bottom part of the window to the sill. With that removed, the window could tilt back as far as needed for someone to climb up and out, which is precisely what we did.

  We let the window rest quietly against the outside of the sill before we dropped quietly to the ground. The inside of the yard was empty, but reasonably well-lit thanks to the full moon. Aside from the natural light, only a few artificial lights illuminated the buildings on the quad.

  I knew the rounds that the overnight training staffers would travel as they visited each squad bay. Ours wasn’t the only bay full of recruits. But the rounds certainly didn’t take the staff an entire hour. There was speculation, among the recruits, about what the overnight staff did with the rest of their time. Cam and I hoped that they didn’t actually walk the perimeter grounds as we were told they did. I guessed we were about to find out.

  Our building was the structure farthest south on the internal campus, and the one closest to the scattered trees on the grounds. Those trees would be the only way we would get through this without getting caught. I hoped.

  We were lucky. Though the academy had recently installed new security cameras on the inner campus, the techs hadn’t yet had a chance to install the perimeter fence cameras. I knew, because while I’d been waiting in medical, I’d overheard one of the drill instructors bitching about having to monitor two systems until the camera migration was complete. Another instructor had joked that the old system was so old that most of the staff refused to use it, which I knew included all perimeter fences except the gates. I was banking everything on the transformative power of cloud-based surveillance systems… that, and people's laziness.

  We carefully made our way towards the tree line, hiding behind the southern side of the cars left in the parking area nearest our building, testing each as we went. Eventually, we found a car with the doors unlocked and liberated a floor mat from the vehicle. From there, we cut through the woods and made our way to the southern fence. Cam tossed the floor mat up to cover the razor wire on the top of the fence, then boosted me up so I could scramble up and over. I groaned when I dropped to the ground on the other end, watching in envy as my friend easily scrambled over after me, not at all out of breath.

  Timing our movement to cross the road until there were no headlights in either direction, we made our way into the tree line. From there, we jogged a mile west through the very familiar running trails until we came out on West Road. Cam watched me closely, but thankfully didn’t comment on our slow pace. I hunched over my thighs at the edge of the tree line, gulping in air.

  We’d angled our path to exit the woods near a large sand pit where the locals went dirt biking during the day. The pit was deserted and eerily quiet in the moonlight. On the other side of the large open area, we finally saw the final piece to our escape puzzle. There, at the entrance to West Road, sat the idling yellow cab that I had scheduled from Devens, before we had left to go back to the academy.

  - - -

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